Signing in to Gmail from Kennel Connection is Blocked by Google Even with “Allow Less Secure Apps” Option Enabled.

Gmail, while a great service to use to send emails from third party applications such as Kennel Connection, like many other email providers these days has tightened their security requirements. There may be a new step involved to allow Kennel Connection or other third-party software to connect to and use the Gmail email servers to send messages.

Before continuing, you MUST make sure that you have the “Allow less secure apps” option enabled in Gmail. If you’re not sure or have not done it yet, please check and/or enable it now.  Click here for instructions. 

Once you have made sure the “Allow less secure apps” option is enabled, please see step 1.

1. Open Kennel Connection and with your Gmail settings in place, click the “Test email settings” button. If you receive a “test message successful” pop-up, you’re good to start using the email features of KC. If you receive an error, please view the email error log. If you see the following in your error log:

This means that Google is still blocking your Gmail account from accessing their servers from third party applications (Kennel Connection) and you must take further action.

2. Google provides you with help links in their email error logs. Please follow the link in your web browser: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/78754

3. Scroll down to the “Troubleshoot problems” section. If you are 100% sure that the same email address and password you use to login to Gmail on a web browser are the same ones you have entered in KC/email settings and that you have the “Allow less secure apps” option enabled, please proceed to the following bullet point:

• “If the tips above didn’t help, visit https://www.google.com/accounts/displayunlockcaptcha and follow the steps on the page.”Once you have clicked the link you should see a web page open that looks like this:

4. Click “Continue” on the web page

5. After a few seconds you should see this:

 This means that Google should now allow third party software (Kennel Connection) to connect to their servers. Close your web browser and navigate back to Kennel Connection. Click the “test email settings” button again and you should now see a successful message.

Important notes:

• You cannot use two-factor authentication if you plan on using Gmail in your Kennel Connection software. You can look in your Gmail security settings in your account settings to see if two-factor is enabled. If it is, you must disable it. (Two-factor authentication is when you attempt to login to your Gmail from a new location or device, before you can, it sends you a text message of a pin # and you have to enter that pin # each time before login occurs.)
  
  
• Since Gmail tracks all sent emails, a nice feature of using Gmail as your email settings in KC is if someone says they did not receive an email or text message from you, you can login to your Gmail account in your web browser and search your sent items. Sent items FROM KC should be logged in that folder and you can look for that specific message. If you see it in your sent items and it was not received by the recipient, this means Google has sent your message and it’s either in spam/junk on the recipient’s email account or it was blocked by the recipients account.